Henry David Thoreau is a new PBS documentary in three parts, each an hour long. The project comes with a voiceover cast of heavyweights, with narration from George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum playing the great essayist and additional voices from Ted Danson, Tate Donovan and Meryl Streep.
The project began life as a short film. Don Henley, the Eagles frontman, has long worked to preserve Walden Pond, in the woodlands outside Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau lived between 1845 and 1847 and wrote his great book: Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Seeking to capture the place’s magic, Henley approached Ken Burns, the legendary documentarian. As executive producer, Burns entrusted the project to two regular collaborators, brothers Erik and Christopher Loren Ewers. Like the ferns and fiddleheads that carpet the forest floor at Walden, the film began to grow.
